Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. Lena Dunham
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like it when a guy starts out rude, explains that it’s a defense mechanism, and then turns even ruder once I get to know him. As I passed the quarter-century mark of being alive and entered into a relationship with a truly kind person, all this changed. I now consider myself in jerk recovery, so being around any of the aforementioned behaviors isn’t yet safe for me.
My attraction to jerks started early. I spent my preadolescent summers in a cottage by a lake, curled on a ratty couch in my mom’s mind the gap t-shirt, watching movies like Now and Then and The Man in the Moon. If I took anything away from these tales of young desire, it was that if a guy really liked you he would spray you with a water gun and call you nicknames like the Blob. If he shoved you off your bike and your knees bled, it probably meant he was going to kiss you by a reservoir soon enough.
My earliest memory of sexual arousal is watching Jackie Earle Haley as Kelly Leak in Bad News Bears. He wore a leather jacket, rode a motorcycle before the legal age, smoked, and treated his elders with a kind of disrespect I had never seen executed by any of the boys at Quaker school. Moreover, he ogled adult women like a Hefner acolyte. Later, I was drawn to images of angry attraction, I-want-you-despite-myself type stuff, the kind of thing that Jane Eyre and Rochester were up to. You know the way Holly Hunter looks at William Hurt in Broadcast News, like she hates everything he stands for? That was dreamy. Even 9½ Weeks made some terrible kind of sense. All of this is natural enough—who doesn’t thrill at a little push-pull, a bit of athletic conversation—but I’m the first to admit I’ve often taken it too far.
It’s common wisdom that having a good dad tends to mean you’ll pick a good man, and I have pretty much the nicest dad in the world. I don’t mean nice in a neutered “yes, dear” way. I mean nice in that he has always respected my essential nature and offered me an expert mix of space and support. He’s a firm but benevolent leader. He talks to adults like they’re juvenile delinquents and to kids like they’re adults. I’ve often tried to write a character based on him, but it’s such a challenge to distill his essence. I wasn’t always easy, and neither was he—after all, artists like to hole themselves up in their studios for days and pitch fits about bad lighting—but the careful, reliable attention of this man has been integral to my sense of security. To this day, the truest feeling of joy I have ever known is the door opening at a friend’s house to reveal my father—in his tweed overcoat—there to rescue me from a bad play date.
Once, when I was five, I was at an art opening talking to a fabulous drunken British lady. It was considerably past my bedtime, and the whole scene was starting to bum me out. I stood next to my friend Zoe, who, at only four, was an embarrassingly juvenile companion. The British lady, trying to make conversation, asked Zoe and me what our parents did if we were “bad girls.”
“When I’m bad, I get a time-out,” Zoe said.
“When I’m bad,” I announced, “my father sticks a fork in my vagina.”
This is hard to share without alarm bells sounding. We’re taught to listen to little girls, particularly when they say things about being sodomized with cutlery. Also my father makes sexually explicit artwork so he’s probably already on the FBI’s fork-in-vagina radar. It’s a testament to his good nature that, after the British lady repeated my “hilarious” story to a group of adults, he simply scooped me up and said, “I think it’s someone’s bedtime.”
It’s hard to grasp what my intent was here—we’re talking about a child who was fond of pretending a ghost was touching her nonbreasts against her will—but I guess the moral of this story is that my dad’s really nice, yet I’ve always had an imagination that could grasp, maybe even appreciate, the punitive.
There is a theory not often discussed—perhaps because I’m the inventor of the theory—that if your father is incredibly kind, you will seek an opposite relationship as an act of rebellion.
Nothing about my history would imply that I’d dig jerks. I went to my first Women’s Action Coalition meeting at age three. We, the daughters of downtown rabble-rousers, sat in a back room, coloring in line drawings of Susan B. Anthony while our mothers plotted their next demonstration. I understood that feminism was a worthy concept long before I was aware of being female, listening to my mother and her friends discuss the challenges of navigating the male-dominated art world. My feminist indoctrination continued at forward-thinking private schools where gender inequality was as much a topic of study as algebra, at all-girls camp in Maine, and as I looked through my grandmother’s wartime photo albums (“Nurses did the real work,” she always said). And underscoring it all was my father’s insistence that my sister and I were the prettiest, smartest, and baddest bitches in Gotham town, no matter how many times we pissed ourselves or cut our own bangs with blunt kitchen scissors.
I don’t think I met a Republican until I was nineteen, when I shared an ill-fated evening of lovemaking with our campus’s resident conservative, who wore purple cowboy boots and hosted a radio show called Real Talk with Jimbo. All I knew when I stumbled home from a party behind him was that he was sullen, thuggish, and a poor loser at poker. How that led to intercourse was a study in the way revulsion can quickly become desire when mixed with the right muscle relaxants. Midintercourse on the moldy dorm rug, I looked up into my roommate Sarah’s potted plant and noticed something dangling. I tried to make out its shape, and then I realized—it was the condom. Mr. Face for Radio had flung the prophylactic into our tiny palm tree, thinking I was too dumb, drunk, or eager to call him on it.
“I think …? The condom’s …? In the tree?” I muttered feverishly.
“Oh,” he said, like he was as shocked as I was. He reached for it as if he was going to put it back on, but I was already up, stumbling toward my couch, which was the closest thing to a garment I could find. I told him he should probably go, chucking his hoodie and boots out the door with him. The next morning, I sat in a shallow bath for half an hour like someone in one of those coming-of-age movies.
He didn’t say hi to me on campus the next day, and I didn’t even know if I wanted him to. He graduated in December, and with him so did 86 percent of Oberlin’s Republican population. I channeled my feelings of shame into a short experimental film called Condom in a Tree (a classic!) and determined that the next time I was penetrated it would be a more respectful situation.
That’s when I met Geoff.
Geoff was a senior, a fair-haired meditator who once cried in my parents’ hammock because, he told me, “You are forcing sex when I just want to be heard.” He had his low points.2 But for the most part, he nurtured and supported me. We loved each other in a calm, gentle, and equal way. Geoff was not a jerk, but he also wasn’t for me.
We broke up, as most college couples do. I spent the next month bedridden, unable to stomach anything but mac and cheese. Even my patient father grew tired of my cartoonish heartbreak. But at my first postcollege job in a downtown restaurant, I met a different kind of guy. Joaquin was almost ten years older than me, born in Philadelphia, and possessed a swagger that seemed unearned, considering he was wearing a FUCKING FEDORA. His body was long and lean, and he dressed like Marlon Brando in Streetcar. He was my overlord, a cynical foodie whose favorite maxims included “It would suck to live past forty-five.” Even though he had a girlfriend, we flirted. The flirting consisted of him questioning my general intelligence and noting my lack of spatial awareness